My Web Summit Chapter 3: Alexa, Alexa, who is the geekiest mum in the kingdom?
This chapter is a bit of a follow-up to a previous article I wrote about Parenting in the digital age, where I tried to identify the shift in mindset that parents may need to successfully guide their children in today’s rapidly changing world.
It’s very possible i missed a few talks or startup presentations but, in my opinion, education would have deserved a much bigger part at Web Summit, since it is probably the area that requires the fastest evolution.
Although I didn’t have a real ‘ah ah’ moment at the conference on this topic, i think that just attending events like this and striving to keep up with tech and innovation is actually an important part of my job as a mum.
I referred in ‘Chapter 1’ to the talk from Minecraft’s Studio Head Helen Chiang that was a real highlight for me, particularly on the notion of bridging the gap between gaming and learning. Minecraft is used in classrooms nowadays to teach coding to children. With interdisciplinarity at its core, the game is used by students, among other things, to recreate real-life monuments, such as the greek Parthenon, leveraging history, mathematics, architecture and coding skills all at once.
It reminded me of my visit, a few months ago, at the Haba Digitalwerkstatt in Berlin, that organises coding workshops for children, where i kind of heard about this game for the first time (shame on me i know, sorry i’m really not into gaming, like…at all).
One of the topics we discussed back then was the increasing gap between parents worried about their teens’ screentime and in reverse the frustration of a young boy/girl deploying all their creativity, teamwork and geometry genius to build a new blocs masterpiece, going totally unrecognised at home or at best welcome with a concerned look ‘please, get away from that tablet!’
They decided to start inviting parents in the workshops to break this wall and get them to understand and participate in their children’s brand new world, with the success you may expect. What can be more rewarding for a kid than become teacher for their parents? Suddenly a mum would gain a new level of respect for using her engineer skills in the game or the entire family would reconstitute their mocked-up ‘wooden house’ in real life on a week-end.
One of the messages that stuck with me since this conversation, and that got amplified at Web Summit, is that watching technology evolution as an outsider can, in the best case generate fascination or at worst fear which can only paralyse us. Only by getting to a stage of mastery can we demystify technologies and help driving innovation in the direction we want it to go.
So i guess parents, let’s get coding (and let’s definitely try Minecraft!)
Mastery…also in protecting our children
Actually, i lied, i did have a ‘ah ah’ moment, or should i say a ‘oh oh’ moment, when listening to the story of a child growing up with an ‘AI sibling’.
Story, as in fictional right? Well what if i tell you the AI’s name is Alexa?
‘Alexa, who is your mama?’, ‘Alexa, play my favorite song!’, ‘Alexa, what should i wear today?’, ‘Alexa, I’m feeling a little sad today, i think it’s this guy at school…’
The dad in the panel explained how his 4 years old girl had been living with Amazon’s echo since before she could even start speaking, and how Alexa had become this ubiquitous presence in the house, that she loves to converse with and confide in and how he realized every single conversation was recorded, stored and available to him (which means of course, to Amazon too). The panel tried to imagine what it may look like to be a teenager having lived with a conversational AI for 13 years, a young professional looking for a job, an ‘old’ person with 70 years of recorded data behind them, and what well or not-so-well-intentioned people or companies may be able to do with this data.
Beyond the fact that the scenario itself calls for a bestseller sci-fi novel, this projection triggered my maternal instinct and a level of indignation and fear
But this is not sci-fi, this is happening today, and although we are all ‘babies’ in regards to the newest technologies, this is one more reason to learn and always be just one step ahead to be able to provide ‘our babies’ with the protection they need.
